When Dame Barbara Woodward was named British Ambassador to China in February 2015, she became the first woman ever to hold this position. Conscious of her status as a trailblazer and role model, Ambassador Woodward has made a special commitment to promoting gender equality since assuming office.

Elena L. Botelho, co-author of the best-seller The CEO Next Door and a partner at leadership advisory firm ghSMART, explains why people misunderstand what it takes to get to the corner office Many people aim to climb the corporate ladder even though the responsibilities of a CEO are immense, and their failures can be embarrassingly […]

In addition to the “black swan”, a term which refers to improbable and unforeseeable events, is the “gray rhino”, an expression coined by Michele Wucker to describe highly probable threats that have a potentially high impact yet are often ignored. Why do leaders and decision makers so often fail to address obvious dangers before they spiral out of control? That is the topic of Wucker’s book, The Gray Rhino, which is essential reading for managers, investors, planners, policy makers, and anyone else who wants to understand how to avoid getting trampled in an increasingly changing world.

In his 23 years of executive coaching, Ray Williams, president of Ray Williams Associates in Vancouver, B.C., has advised many executives on how to improve the performance of their teams. He took time out recently for an interview over Skype with CKGSB Knowledge to share his insights on how to make your team more productive, whether they work together in one room or are scattered all over the world.

A new year is a time for fresh starts and new beginnings. At least, that is what policymakers in Beijing will be hoping. The second half of 2018 produced some negative headlines on the economy as a domestic deleveraging drive and the intensifying trade war with the US slowed growth and undermined confidence. Will these headwinds continue battering the Chinese economy or will Beijing be able to engineer a recovery? There are few people better placed to answer this question than Shen Jianguang, one of China’s most respected economic analysts, whose career has included stints at the European Central Bank, IMF and OECD.

Hans Tung knows how to spot a unicorn. During his career, he has invested in 11 startups that have gone on to attain billion-dollar valuations, including Airbnb, Bytedance, Slack, Wish and Xiaomi. Tung is also one of the few venture capitalists that feels equally at home on both sides of the Pacific. A native of Taiwan, he moved to California aged 13 and began his career in Silicon Valley, before becoming one of the first VCs at a US firm to move to China full-time in 2005. Since moving back to the US in 2013, he has continued to invest in both markets.

Pronouncements that the Belt and Road Initiative is failing are premature, argues Tom Miller, author of China’s Asian Dream and Senior Asia Analyst at Gavekal Research. He is well-versed in the problems facing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and predicted many of them. In his 2017 book China’s Asian Dream, he warned that China’s preference for cultivating close relationships with individual leaders could be a long-term risk for BRI. Eighteen months on, this looks prescient. New governments have won power in Malaysia, Pakistan and the Maldives, and renegotiating deals signed by their predecessors are high on the agendas.

Economic changes taking place in China are rippling across the world, causing rapid upheaval in global supply chains. Manufacturers are moving to lower-wage economies, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is creating a new web of trade flows and the rise of cross-border e-commerce is accelerating demand for goods from across the world. And then, of course, there is a possible global trade war to factor into the equation. Dealing with all this uncertainty requires ice-cool pragmatism, as FedEx’s China head, Eddy Chan, has learned.

Few thinkers can speak about global governance with as much authority as Kishore Mahbubani. A former President of the United Nations Security Council, Permanent Secretary of Singapore’s Foreign Ministry and Dean of the renowned Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, he has been named “the muse of the Asian century”. In his latest book, due next year, Mahbubani plans to tackle the rising tensions between the US and China. As he explains, the US should embrace a more minimalist and strategic approach to foreign policy to maximize its interests in an era of Asian dominance.

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Information, analysis, and interviews about the Chinese economy and doing business in China, from the people who know it best. Presented by the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, China's leading business school.